You're right actually, I'll put it in a more suitable machine 😁
Thanks for the input though, I'll keep my eyes open for a suitable card and when I can afford it pick up a wavetable board.

[Edit]
Would an awe64 value be a terrible stopgap?
Locally, I'm not seeing a whole lot else 🙁

Personally, I wouldn't use an AWE64 of any breed these days. I readily confess to have owned an AWE64 gold back in the days. I was using it for audio and games, but even for that job it isn't very suitable. I rebought an AWE 64 gold a while ago and repeated my dissapointment.

I have followed wavetable boards a while on ebay but usually found them to be very expensive and rare. So to grab one for little, you have to spend a lot of time. However, some people in china sell Nec clones of the DB60XG for a very reasonable price, lower than anything that ever passed my sight elsewhere. I bought two by now and might get a third one eventually. Currently, they cost 20 $US including shipment. They offer them for less every once in a while, so stay tuned.

My personal budged alternative to a SB plus wavetable is the Maestro 32/96, which is a fine "single" card with a decent integrated wavetable and good sound quality. You can even use a second DB on it. However, should you plan on using it together with another card, it will cause you trouble, cause it takes up IRQs galore.

ux-3 wrote:

There is no practical use for a voodoo in a 486. The 486 was introduced in 1989, way before the voodoo 1 hit the scene in 1996.

And would you really want to run a 3D game on a 486 even if you could? I can't see even a DX4 class 486 running a 3D game with a decent framerate regardless of what video card you are using.

leileilol wrote:

Voodoo2 in a DX2 66MHz is a stupid idea Voodoo2 in a DX4 100MHz is a slightly better idea Voodoo2 in a AM5x86 160MHz is actually […]
Show full quote

Voodoo2 in a DX2 66MHz is a stupid idea
Voodoo2 in a DX4 100MHz is a slightly better idea
Voodoo2 in a AM5x86 160MHz is actually kind of usable

Remember there's a big performance jump between DX2 and DX4, if you're new to 486s think along the lines of this kind of performance (going by memory, feel free to correct how incorrect I am):

486 DX2 66 - 14fps in Doom, 15fps in Duke3D, 9fps in Descent, 6fps in Quake
486 DX4 100 - 30fps in Doom, 30fps in Duke3D, 23fps in Descent, 9fps in Quake
AM5x86 133 - 35fps in Doom, 40fps in Duke3D, 25fps in Descent, 11fps in Quake

I'd personally use the AM5x86 for GTA. I have a Voodoo2 working in mine 😀
The only games i'd think 486 66mhz is appropriate for are adventure games (including SVGA ones), flight sims and older strategy games (Command & Conquer will work, but as for Red Alert you can just forget about it since that's a slug for some reason)

Wouldn't a DX2-66 and DX4-100 still be limited by the 33mhz bus, though? On chip the DX2 and DX4 are faster but they can still only communicate the result of their computations to the rest of the system at 33 mhz just like the DX-33.

I'm willing to bet Quake could be playable on a 486 if you replaced most of the floating point stuff with fixed point, add in 3dfx support in dos mode...

Something like this maybe?
http://cgi.ebay.ca/NEW-ESS-ES1868F-w-IDE-16-B … =item33532e3933

[Edit]
To go with the daughterboard I just bought.

TheLazy1 wrote:

I'm willing to bet Quake could be playable on a 486 if you replaced most of the floating point stuff with fixed point, add in 3dfx support in dos mode...

Easier said than done. The floating point stuff is all about the BSP handling - the vertices, the precision of them, and the visplanes. Don't forget the entities that have their own float numbers to manage. It's already mostly optimized to the teeth, it won't even be much faster if you disable the texturing!

Quake was written with the Pentium in mind. And I don't mean that they just used the FPU because it was finally fast. No, the game literally follows the Pentium's design specifically, down to instruction latencies apparently. There are articles about how amazing the code was for what it does. id brought in an x86 assembly god named Michael Abrash and surgically attached his brain to John Carmack's to make it all possible. 😉

I was just thinking about the DS port which is quite playable with no FPU and relatively weak 3d hardware.

What about the sound though?
Will any card with a wavetable header work?

Obviously the chipset is important for other features, but I want to get something compatible with the NEC daughterboard that I bought.
Agonizing 20 day wait apparently though, bah shipping 😀

Nooooo!
My daughterboard arrived but the only card I have with a header is a Vibra 16c 🙁

Is it possible to do some evil combination using that plus a crystal 4232?
Kinda like frankensteining something using 2 sound cards? 😁

TheLazy1 wrote:

I was just thinking about the DS port which is quite playable with no FPU and relatively weak 3d hardware.

There was also Pocket Quake back around 2002 that I followed. That was meant for the 200-400 MHz StrongARM/Xscale CPUs. There is some fixed point conversion but it didn't run very well. It was also entirely software rendered and there is only the one slow CPU in those PDAs. Some people overclocked their PDAs to make it run better, and there were various tweaks of course. 😁

DS Quake seems to use the various co-processors in the DS (according to the author). Pretty cool.

The Quake ports to the various consoles are also interesting. Most of them were clearly simplified. Even the N64 version lost some map details, but it has some very nice graphical enhancements too. I imagine that the N64 was mostly limited by its 4MB of RAM because the rest of the hardware should have been able to run Quake fine.

Oh and you don't want to miss what "DRS" managed to do with his Wii homebrew Quake. He got normal mapping going on the Wii! It's buggy but I've tried it and it's fairly impressive for the sad little Wii hardware.

Yeah, I believe I forgot the massive architectural differences between the two platforms 😀
Any idea about my sound situation though? 🙁

Did you try the Vibra card? If it works then be happy. 😀

I can, but I read somewhere it doesn't have a real OPL chip and other people saying it was poor in general.
Hrm, maybe I'll take all the cards I have lying around and make comparisons of FM implementations.

Sounds like a good way to kill time 😁

Just try it and see if you like it. That's all that matters in the end.

Oh no.
I got my daughterboard installed on the vibra 16C (CT2960) but I think it has some trouble...

In doom, every now and then a high pitched tinge gets set at random intervals during the music.
Could this be the hanging note bug people were talking about?

I'll try and get a sample of what I hear uploaded as soon as I can, other than that it sounds pretty damn good. 😀

Still, it's too annoying not to notice so I hope it can be fixed.

[Edit]
Hrm, so far I haven't heard it since disabling sound effects.
WTF?!

Also, I don't believe the Vibra 16C has a true OPL chip.
FM Sounds like a bag of dicks on this card.

I thought the Vibra was basically a software thingy, though I have to admit my knowledge of soundcards is quite poor to say the least

Linky with bug: http://www.mediafire.com/file/1o6l66atco1jiad/bug.ogg

Yes, that's the hanging note bug. The only way to stop it on an affected card is to disable digital sound (or use another card for digital sound effects).
You're right about the OPL as well - the CT2960 has CQM FM sound, not the real OPL3 chips.

Might it be possible to disable everything on this card except the waveblaster connector and run a Crystal card along side it for everything else?
I'm impatient and no one locally seems to have anything 🙁

Damn you Creative!